Mobility Freestyle Battles
Perhaps I'm dating myself, but I've been a fan of Rap Battles since the days of Old School. Ice-T vs. LL Cool J was one of my favorite. I'll never forget Ice-T in Power “that's weak s*** from a weak mind, and a weak mind creates weak rhymes, you ain't never kicked knowledge one time, just living off your own d***, that's a crime”. Then Biggy and Tupac took it up a level “That's right I f******* yo bi*** mutha*******” . When Easy E fell out with Dre, you have to remember “Bow wow wow yippy yo yippy yay....” . Nas and JayZ was another great one “the streets keep calling, heard in my sleep that this GayZ and Cock a fella records wanna beef”. However, I think the tech nerds are coming up. The Rory vs. Roy battle is great. I first read about it in Casey's site http://www.brains-n-brawn.com and just had to check it out. Basically here's the deal. Rory got to go to the MVP summit altough he's not a MVP. Roy got pissed about it. People let Roy have it and he apologized. But the cool part is that there were like 55 posts on the subject.
Next look at the utterly ghastly microsoft.public.smartphone newsgroup. It's like nothing I've ever seen. Jacek (aka MSMobiles) vs. Jason Dunn, Robert Levy, most MS MVP's and anyone that disagrees with him in general. But it gets downright ugly.
So I'd characterize the Rory/Roy battle like LL and Ice-T. Entertaining and nothing too over the top. So where does that leave the SmartPhone battle? It's kind of hard to tell b/c Jason and Robert are much more diplomatic than most rappers so it'd be hard to come up with an analogy. I'm thinking it's best resemblant either Easy E falling out with NWA and Snoop, but that'd be flawed b/c Jacek and Jason never kicked it in the hood together. Then I got to thinking, aha, it's like the Eminem/Benzino battle. Benzino wants to be Eminem. Eminem is quite successful and not one to back down. Benzino has a pretty successful run hosting The Source but that's pretty much it. And by picking the fight with Eminem, he's picked up some traffic from Eminem fans wondering what he's going to say. Benzino is also notably older than Eminem and definitely more spiteful. His diatribes are usually pretty nasty and always more spiteful than funny. But the analogy falls apart there. For it to work, Ed Hansberry or Robert Levy would have to be either Obie Trice, Fifty Cent, Lloyd Banks or Lil Buck. I haven't met Ed, but I can tell you for sure that the whole Platinum tooth thing wouldn't work for Robert and I'm guessing the same is the case for Ed.
This is precisely one of those stupid things that my mind drones on about at times and I can't get the analogy to work no matter how hard I try. I guess this is a good sign I need to start writing some code...